Does anyone have an opinion of Tomcat running in a very high traffic environment, let's say, 100K - 500K unique visits/day?
If you have that many visits (with significant session overhead and/or HTTPS requests), I'd suggest using multiple machines with a load-balancer. But there's no reason to think that Tomcat can't handle load when scaled horizontally.
I'm also wondering about the possibility of running a Tomcat server standalone as opposed to using mod_jk.so with Apache to mount webapps with. Would this be more stable, and is there any loss to me if I *don't* use Apache?
The Apache connectors are the ones doing the load-balancing, so you lose that. For a real high-volume site, I'd recommend a hardware-based load balancer like BigIP or something similar. They are much more configurable in terms of how to divide traffic.
The other thing you lose is performance. You rarely want Tomcat to serve your static content. All it does it tie up threads that could be serving dynamic content; meanwhile it's filling up your heap space with temporary objects, so the GC has to run more frequently to pick up old objects that weren't very useful.
I'd highly recommend using Apache; but consider a static build of the Tomcat connector instead of the DSO, 'cause it might be a few percent faster.
-chris
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